Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design

by Whitney Quesenbery, Kevin Brooks, Ginny Redish (Foreword)

We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs. Testimonials "Stories facilitate a level of communication that is as close to telepathy as you can get. Kevin and Whitney guide you to use storytelling in `how to' scenarios so smoothly that you may never realize how far you leapfrogged ahead and never know the mistakes you didn't make because of this book. It's that good." €”Annette Simmons, author of The Story Factor "A very practical, readable survey of ways to use one of the world's oldest and most powerful transmedia forms€”storytelling€”to increase the coherence and effectiveness of digital artifacts. Brooks and Quesenbery offer concrete strategies for creating a richer design process

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Business, Reference, Usability, Communication, Technology

298 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She has been in the field since 1989, helping companies from The Open University to Sage Software to the National Cancer Institute develop usable websites and applications.

She is the director of the UPA Usability in Civic Life project and has been appointed to the US Elections Assistance Commission’s guidelines development committee, where she works to ensure the usability of voting systems. She represented UPA on an Advisory Committee for the Access Board (TEITAC), working to update US accessibility regulations.

She has served as the President of UPA (Usability Professionals’ Association), Manager of the STC Usability and User Experience (UUX), and a member of the Executive Committee for UXNet, as well as an active participant in local usability groups. In 2005 she was given the STC President’s Award for her work on communities in membership organizations, and in 2007, she was honored with a UPA President’s Award and as a Fellow of the STC.

Reviews

[Steven Tomcavage · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started reading this book for a UI book club. I got to page 75 and hadn't learned anything beyond how a story is structured and why people tell stories. These are things that I already learned as an undergraduate English major. I was wondering how stories could apply to my current job as web applications developer, but I got too frustrated with the lack of information that I never made it far enough in the book to find out. Hopefully the author gets around to the topic of the book before it ends, but I will never know.

[Stacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

An alternate title for this book could be: "How to Conduct and Share Usability tests". The methods presented here are best practices for any type of user research and compiling and sharing those findings.

It was a great refresher for this Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing now faced with a technology-driven job of creating experiences within software. It could have been half as long, but I feel that way about most occupational "how to" books.

[Put · Rating 2 out of 5]

ironic.

[H.d. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ótima reflexão sobre como aplicar a prática da narrativa no dia-a-dia de projetos de UX.

Entendo que para vários públicos e contextos é necessária uma defesa das razões para utilizar narrativas no trabalho, acredito que no contexto brasileiro e em empresas/projetos que tenham equipes multidisciplinares, esse entendimento já seja natural. Sendo assim dá pra pular quase metade do livro :)

E é aí que fica interessante. Com exemplos da aplicação feita pelos autores em cada uma das fases do design centrado no usuário, da pesquisa aos testes. Passando por ótimos momentos de uso das histórias como elemento de ignição de sessões de ideação.

Em especial gostei muito to capítulo que fala da escuta antes da narrativa e do processo de ideação realizado em um hospital.

Indico para os colegas que trabalham com experiência do usuário, como uma introdução ao tema, para depois seguir em frente com John Campbell, Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, Doc Comparato e outros autores que encontraram na narrativa um instrumento de comunicação e mudança de comportamento.

[Tony Bergstrom · Rating 1 out of 5]

It had promise at first, but I'm sure there are better books out there to cover the subject. The problem is that the book gets too hung-up on the many details and variations of story structure to the detriment of UX and design.

The first chapters provide some reasonable motivation to use stories, nothing too surprising. The book then delves into the many details of story structure, and becomes repetitive and wordy. I don't quit books easily, but in the later chapters I found that reading the first section, skimming the section headers, and reading the summary to be a better approach to this book.

[Andreas]

Finally a book that mentions the standard process for User Centred Design: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfel...

[Maciek Lipiec · Rating 1 out of 5]

Better read ANY good novel...

[Brendan Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book rips. This is the first book I've read on the art and practice of storytelling and I by the end of it, felt like a master. People like to say their books aren't exhaustive and love to point out all the nooks and crannies they missed, but Storytelling for User Experience, is a one-stop shopping experience in my opinion. Quite unlike any other book I've read that deals with a subject matter that could be endlessly reshuffled in order to satisfy a arbitrary page count set by a publisher, Quesenbery hardly ever repeats herself and structures the book in a way that I find very natural and convincing.

The author does reveal her hand a bit in the second half where she describes the craft of telling stories. Much of the information here sounds more like how to win your high-school talent show or kill it at open-mic night with a story rather than how craft in storytelling works in a design context. But at the same time, this is a magical experience. There is a great deal of wonder contained within stories and there's no way anyone could apply storytelling to their design practice without being enchanted by them. Quesenbery transfers her passion through her writing, so that the reader isn't left with a bunch of tools for shallow story writing.

I'm not yet sure how I'll apply what I learned in this book to my career or my daily life. Although, I do think I've learned how to be a better listener. Regardless, I'm glad I read it and would recommend it to anyone with any interest in stories.

[Arnold Saputra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boriiiing book with lot of repetitive content. Not worth of your time. This book isn't practical and both of the writer just tell you common sense like, Use multimedia and image for engaging story telling.
Really wasted my time by reading it.

[Yang Ziyi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stopped at the 2nd chapter...
I agree to some of the reviews that this book is too tedious and keeps repeating obvious stuffs. Some people may find it helpful, but I feel it is over complicating problems and not worth the reading time...

[Mishaal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Verbose.

[Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buen apoyo para el desarrolo del trabajo de la investigación en UX, el desarrollo de hipótesis y el trabajo en equipo para proyectos digitales.

[Beth Filar Williams]

Read this for work for my job and cleaned a lot of good ideas from it I never really thought about how a story is actually crafted.

[Devangi Godara · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’re already familiar with basic storytelling, you won’t find anything groundbreaking here. Just a lot of 'duh' moments.

[Davy · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5 stars) This would be an easy 4 stars if I would have read this earlier in my career, maybe even a year an a half ago. One of the major things I've learned from this book was to really utilize the power of storytelling as a communication mechanism. I always watch our presentations and marvel at the power of the story and how it can really put you in the shoes of that person, and that's what this book teaches you how to do.

For a UX Research book club we held at Goodreads yesterday, we had the author participating, and my piece of feedback for her was that for a future edition of this book, to really tie this to how this is applied in an AGILE environment. There was some talk about user stories in this book, but as she said, since this was being written in 2006, it wasn't as popular as it was today.

Overall, I think this book is a great read for designers, product managers, engineers, marketers.. and Morgane said in her review.. everyone in our field.

[Sashko Valyus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Хороша книга, але структура сильно кульгає. Те що ти очікуєш прочитати зявляється десь в другій половині книги. З одного боку і води небагато, і книга виконує свою задачу, а з другого боку в ній описується досить широкий спектр використання історій та методів створення, тому для тих хто хоче швидко підтягнути свої знання по UX вона не підійде.
Книга буде корисна тим хто широкому коли професіоналів, від тренерів до інженерів.

[Brian Duchek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good writing, solid recommendations and good direction. Not a topic that's solidly relevant to many lean organizations and practitioners. If you're interested as a writer, there's probably other, better primers. Took me forever to finally complete. Ended with a great story; shame the rest of the tome wasn't as engaging.

[Susan Huotari · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book because of the FAQ section at the beginning, which offered to answer the why and how of UX storytelling. As a UX practitioner I wanted to be able to open this book and find some help for my task at hand. Namely, how to do it. I am more interested in how to sketch storyboards for prototyping and prototype user validation, than what I discovered in this book.

[Connie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read, nice layout, good stories. First half justifies the use of storytelling, so I found the second half more useful in constructing stories to use in design.

[Aditya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some interesting anecdotes but apart from that quite a standard book on stories as research and communication medium.

[Cara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping for more from this book

[Chris Herdt]

I won this book as a door prize at a World Usability Day event. I may or may not read it.

[Montgomery Webster]

Read first 2 chapters.